A pro-Palestinian protest action briefly blocked all traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Starting at about 7:45 a.m. Protesters stopped cars and stretched banners across the roadway denouncing Israel’s bombing of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel.
Northbound and southbound traffic on the bridge was at a standstill as of 8 a.m.
Commuted on that bridge for many years. I wouldn’t stand in front of that traffic. Lucky they didn’t have any fatalities
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No, he said that he wouldn’t trust other not to do it. Also, you don’t know how much people are being inconvenienced by it, assuming that it’s a small inconvenience is quite the stretch.
I did indeed misread the first sentence of comment, apologies.
They are preaching to the choir in San Francisco. They should be protesting in D.C.
They do
I don’t get it. When does it become morally acceptable to block traffic?
Between Just Stop Oil and Stop Arming Israel, they both have equally valid points. So why is it that blocking the Golden Gate Bridge is “based” while blocking various feeder roads in Britain makes you a twat?
Edit: messed up the titles
It’s absolutely acceptable. Driving isn’t some untouchable human right that goes above everything else and can’t yield to something else for a little bit.
Nah brah. There could be an ambulance carrying your child to a hospital in that queue.
Or a dude on its way to an interview after more than two years trying to land a job.
Or a person about to catch a flight.
So, not absolutely acceptable. No.
Or tens of thousands of children being slaughtered. Nah brah
How does this help though? It just makes people annoyed at protesters and, if anything, detracts from their cause. Protesting is great, blocking traffic is a criminal offence.
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They block ambulances and I have zero problems with people kneeling for the anthem.
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“common” “usually”
How about don’t do things like that and you won’t have to have faith in backup plans?
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If it prevents people from taking planes, that’s a good thing climate and pollution wise.
Considering that the planes were still flying around empty when travel restrictions were in place, I don’t think a few passengers caught in a traffic jam are going to keep the planes from taking off.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ghost-flights-pandemic-greenpeace-cmd/index.html
It absolutly is not, protest how ever you want with or without a permit from the municipality, you are responsibly for your own actions. If you delay an emergency vehicle, those lives are on your head.
When I lived in Boston this happened multiple times. The one that comes to mind was some eco-protest that linked the protesters to oil drums filled with concrete on mass pike (the main east-west highway into the city). There were emergency vehicles stuck in the jam and someone died that was on their way to the hospital. IIRC most of the protestors are still in jail for murder.
Actually the right to travel is a human right. You are the oppressor in this because you are inflicting your will on everyone else.
They’re both twats. They aren’t making converts or reaching the people who can even effectuate a change. All the do is poison the well for the middle of the country that otherwise might have been receptive.
If I’m on my way to work, or the hospital, or to visit gram gram and some whack job makes my life noticeably more miserable then I’m always going to have negative feelings for them.
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Nope. Not always. Next time you have to drive a loved one to the hospital, and then there is a blockade because of “the children of North Korea,” let me know if you feel like sympathizing with the blockers.
Edit: I understand the whole Palestinian crisis is a very sensitive subject, and people get emotional with this kind of topic. But we can’t have that “either you’re us or against us” mentality. It’s not like I’m saying “don’t protest, and your cause sucks!” I’m saying “yes, protest, and yes, disrupt, but disrupt it to the people who can actually do something about it.”
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That’s a false equivalence. The traffic in front of your house is not caused by some people who can’t think of better ways to protest.
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Again… not the point. And that’s another false equivalency. “People with different reasons to be on the road are blocked by people are being a public threat in the name of some cause.” “Well, serves them right for being a public threat with their cars!” No, that’s not a good argument.
your way of thinking about it is suspiciously close to the one of those who want protesters run over.
I’m just going to pretend you didn’t write this absurd sentence.
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If it’s an emergency an ambulance will drive an alternate route because they have contingency plans in place for blocked highways like with major car accidents or infrastructure failure.
Sure. Because an ambulance can totally divert to an alternative way when it’s already on the bridge. And if it’s not on the bridge already, then the “alternative way” is the “already too late” way. That’s why there is a bridge there in the first place.
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Insightful comment. Thank you.
I still gotta add, though: just because ambulances are trained to deal with protest blockades, doesn’t justify said blockades. Like a cop is trained to deal with thieves that shoot at them, we don’t say “ok! Violent burglary attempts may continue to happen, then.” So yeah, good to know that ambulances have an alternative, but that doesn’t mean I’m okay with these blockades all of a sudden. Plus not everyone wanting to cross that bridge (or road, or whatever) has a good contingency plan.
When does it become morally acceptable to block traffic?
When there is a truck with people carrying your mom to a lynching site.
Other than that, I agree with you. Blocking traffic is one of the dumbest way to protest. You won’t get any sympathizers from that car queue.
I wish we could block more than traffic
Apparently if you are a farmer in Europe people support your right to block traffic
I don’t support them either
Britain is the rotting husk of a colonial empire. The people are psudo-fascist bootlickers obsessed with institutional proceduralism who think good things fundamentally cannot happen.
*England is…
Unless you are DIRECTLY saving a human life, it isn’t.
I get that it gets your movement noticed. But not by the people that can do a damn thing about it.
And the people that maybe can do something, like Biden? They will never reward such tactics so as to not encourage more protests of the type.
And you want to point to civil rights protests doing the same thing? When the first Selma to Montgomery march happened, it was Sunday, a day when at the time few travelled anywhere but church on Sunday. They deliberately chose low traffic times and announced it well in advance.
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Run them over?!
Rotting car brain syndrome.
someone needs to spend some time on !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
Truly a gathering of the most level headed people on Lemmy
Wait, do you think people continuing to drive would somehow cause more Palestinian deaths? Is that what you are claiming? You do know the vehicles are not carrying weapons for Israel or anything like that?
The fact is, this protest saved not one life. It changed no one’s mind. It accomplished nothing but making a lot of people have a bad day.
deliberately misunderstanding the point of protests doesn’t make you look smarter than the protesters.
The problem with a lot of protests is the protesters don’t understand the point of a protest.
Sometimes people get so emotional over a cause they can’t understand things from the perspective of other people.
So they end up coming off like selfish crazy people which at best convinces no one, and at worst turns people against their cause.
Many times protests are just about people wanting to be around other people that share their emotions about the cause. This results in a need to find an outlet for these emotions. But because it’s an emotional thing they can’t think out a logical way to further their cause. So instead it’s just about expressing emotion. Which may be cathartic for the protesters but doesn’t do anything to further the cause.
Israel is obviously not going to stop until they get the hostages back. Blocking bridges won’t change anything. It’s just unnecessarily inconveniencing people and only serves to make people think Palestinian movement is an irrational movement that doesn’t care about anything other than themselves.
I’d argue there are no “rational” protests because protests only exist when there is no path to a legal or democratic resolution available.
You don’t protest your landlord fixing your broken heating because there’s laws saying they have to. You don’t protest the elected government, you protest when the elected government breaks the law without recourse.
I don’t think you understand what democracy is. Protest is a right in a democracy, because it can lead to positive change. It’s part of the process. A protest can influence elected leaders.
Emotional protests are poorly thought out and can often lead to negative outcomes. You of course have a right to do an emotional protest, but you aren’t accomplishing anything.
The Palestinian protests are the worst thought out protests I’ve ever seen. We just had one this week where I live and they protested a hospital founded by Canadian Jews. So everyone rightly condemned the protest as antisemitic and it didn’t help their cause at all. But I guess they got to spend some time with others that are upset by the same thing they’re upset about, that seems to be the only thing that’s important to them.
Protest is only a right in a democracy because of… well… protest lol. If they banned protests they’d get worse protests than if they didn’t, or else they have to murder dissidents (See Russia)
If we could’ve voted to end the war in Iraq, there would have been no protests about ending the war in Iraq because people would have just gone to the polls.
What are you on about? There is an entire procedure for lawful protest.
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What does it say about your cause when the leadership can’t be bothered to fill out a piece of paperwork?
Which is used when there is no democratic or legal recourse to a situation. What is the democratic or legal resource, then, for an average citizen to get their government to publicly denounce genocide in Israel/Palestine?
I don’t believe your question was asked in good faith.
What do you think the point of a protest is?
Depends.
The point of a rational protest is to raise awareness and support for a cause. Potentially influence people in power to change policy.
The point of an emotional protest is to simply express emotion without any consideration of achieving any goal.
They Palestinian protests are of the second type. Which is the type of protest that can boil over into violent outbursts which is concerning. Not that violent outbursts will change anything either, no one is going to give in intimidation tactics. But people could be hurt by these protesters.
INB4 the “but they don’t hurt people as bad as Israel is hurting people” crowd, who only prove the point that this is all about emotion and nothing else.
Weird dichotomy.
Protests can be entirely rational without the main motivation being recruitment.
Apparently to block ambulances
If you think that trolley problem meme accurately reflects the point of the protests, you look pretty stupid.
I was talking about the drivers and driving in the OP article.
Well, I was responding to the meme suggesting that blocking traffic was directly saving lives somehow.
Me not playing in traffic and blocking ambulances makes me smarter.
I don’t understand. Every shill in this thread explained that literally everyone blocked from the bridge was a white wealthy tourist and it was only for 15 minutes. Your “creative” meme implies direct control over the situation. Which is the truth?
Are they tourists or are they political elites?
Based.
I’m happy with leftists doing shit like this to support Palestine as long as they vote for Joe Biden too - even if they disagree with the DNC on foreign policy - out of respect for the minorities of the US and the western world at large who would be thoroughly fucked under Trump.
Doing anything else just means you’re just an accelerationist POS who wants everyone to suffer so we can all bask in your narcissistic vision of revolution/rapture as salvation.
Being silent on the Israel-Palestine war and not opposing all right-winger warmongers who started it (Netanyahou, Hamas) is also wrong.
I voted for Biden, and I’ll be doing so again. I voted for Hillary as well. Each time made me feel a little sick, like I had given my support to the atrocities that would now be committed with the “mandate of the voters”.
It won’t change the fact that I will vote for Biden (it is the best option after all). But comments like yours, that feel the need to throw accusations and bully people into selling that little piece of their soul, even when no one brought up withholding votes from Biden, make that sick feeling worse.
If there are people who are at the cusp of withholding their votes from Biden, your comment is not the kind of argument that will shame them into joining your side. Rather it will push them further towards abstaining. And while you might feel you have the moral high ground over people like that, you are still contributing to the problem.
Edit: To those considering their vote for Biden, I think this comment does a good job putting it into perspective. It talks about some of the good he has actually accomplished, and makes a decent case for how voting can’t become a zero sum game or we will lose more than we gain.
Even if people will still vote for Biden we need public opinion to swing so drastically that the Dems will at least panic and do something different than unconditionally support israel.
Openly saying that you are going to vote for Genocide Joe while he does the Genocide is absolutely useless.
There is definitely some truth in what you are saying. But for me, that has to be weighed against the risks of another Trump presidency. Which from what I’ve seen, will be worse for the Palestinian people, as well as many others. There are people very close to me whose rights were infringed upon by the shifts in laws enacted during the Trump years, and fighting for their rights isn’t useless to me.
I do my best to take direct action to show support for the Palestinian people, and would encourage others to do the same. But I worry that if we genuinely want to affect change to benefit the greatest number of people, we can’t just pick our hills to die on, we have to push for solidarity.
What risk? We have seen 2016. Trump will only be marginally worse than Biden. People are still working 20 jobs for little money and have no housing but we sure have 14 Billion for israel lying around.
If you keep confirming to the Democrats that they will never lose by being Republicans Lite, then the Democrats will never change. In fact your direct vote confirms you don’t want them to change
Only by making Democrats lose votes (or at least polling numbers) will they actually start to care. Especially when they see those lost votes directly go to third parties
Due to electing Trump in 2016, we have the majority of U.S. states where women no longer have body autonomy, tons of anti-lbgt laws, and a Supreme Court that continues to weaken voting and civil rights. The Republicans publicly have a plan to install a “deep state” the next time they get a Republican in the presidency (project 2025). It’s quite possible the U.S. will never have “fair” elections after another Republican presidency. Trump and friends have learned from their previous coup attempt, and will try a different method next time.
Ah geez if only Obama was able to codify Roe v Wade which he purposely didn’t to keep the voters hostage.
The DNC sabotaged Bernie in 2016 you can thank the Democrats for losing abortion rights.
And how do LGBT and abortion rights in the US protect the Palestinians from genocide? They are important issues too, but right now there is a president who supports genocide. If he is not punished for it, it will show every future president, that genocide is somewhoe politically acceptable. It shouldn’t be acceptable.
There is no incentive for the Dems to actually stop commiting the same atrocities like the Reps, if they will be voted either way.
You cannot parent a child without good consequences for good behaviour and bad consequences for bad behaviour. It is the same for polticians.
Biden is not doing nothing to fix any of those issues. Biden has been bypassing congress to give bombs to israel.
Unless the dems realize that their hostage holding of voters will no longer work they will never change their rhetoric as you are literally voting for them because of it. You are giving them zero incentive to fix any problems.
Biden is currently cracking down on immigration and supporting israel as if he is a GOP candidate. Not fixing abortion
I don’t think there will be real elections anymore if a Republican wins the next presidential election, so it makes no sense to me to punish the Dem party by locking them out of control of the federal government forever. Furthermore, Trump and Reps are hinting at committing more genocide-like actions on U.S. soil (“rounding up” all the undocumented immigrants, eradicating trans people from public life, etc).
These are people that pay sticker prices at the dealership.
Yeah, some people haven’t learned that “if you do x, you’re an (insult)” doesn’t turn people considering x against x, it more often turns them against the one saying it. Even if they ultimately agree that x is bad, they often also continue considering the one who said that an enemy.
How to Win Friends and Influence People and The 48 Laws of Power were a couple of books that helped me learn this, because we have instincts that lead us astray in these regards (I used to think insults were a viable persuasion strategy myself). So much of it is obvious in hindsight, just by considering things from how I would receive them instead of how to convince someone of something.
Edit: fixed formatting for angled brackets
Edit 2: looks like they just remove angled brackets, escaped or not, switched to boring curvy brackets
I’ve already learned all this but your mistake is thinking I give a fuck. No one’s opinion changes, and the world will end in like 30 years tops.
Ah, so you’re going with the accelerate the end strategy. Can’t say I really blame you. Things aren’t looking good regardless of who wins.
30 years? An optimist I see. /s
Bleh every other thread on Lemmy has “leftists” (usually suspiciously pro-Russia tankies) constantly threatening to shoot themselves and their neighbors by abstaining from democracy, I ain’t reading all that but I’m glad you’re not one of them and thus a comrade of mine, I meant no offense, I was just putting out there something that needs to be said. On reddit I’d usually just tell them to kill themselves and call them goobers but I’m trying to be nice here.
Honestly people hate to hear it, but voting for or against Biden won’t change anything in the US.
What can change things is a greater involvement in local politics, changing our local community and continuing upward to the state level. Then we can talk about abolishing the two party system, introducing term limits, and abolishing lobbying. These are the true plagues of American democracy imo and we’ll be stuck in this cyclical cycle of Biden vs Trump for far longer than the two will be alive for in the form of different names.
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Bruh you’re an idiot. Do you blame Russians for “voting” for Putin too when that mfer literally tortures the opposition to death in prison?
Me, no. My governement? Totally.
Protesting and voting are two separate acts.
The banner says “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”. Is “pro-Palestinian” really the best way to describe them?
Yes, if Israel stops attacking it’s the Palestinians in Gaza who will benefit. But, you don’t have to be pro-Palestinian to want that to happen. You can just be anti-killing-of-civilians, whoever those civilians happen to be.
If 70% of Palestine people passively and actively support Hamas, are the protesters Pro-Hamas?
Edit: downvoters are just in denial. I mean, really, ask yourself this question. And it’s a hypothetical question nontheless so… no shame
Protesting for the right of Palestine to exist and not have thousands of their children bombed to death can hardly equate to support for Hamas.
Palestinian support for Hamas rises as Israel bombs them, their houses and their families. This suggests that supporting Hamas is an act of desperation for the Palestinians, as to them Hamas are simply the only group that actually do something against what they perceive as the Israeli oppressors.
Regardless, the vast majority of protestors would like to see a two-state solution that brings lasting peace to the region, with Hamas as well as Israeli warhawks removed from power. That doesn’t really equate to support for Hamas at all.
So the kilometers of tunnels under civilian houses and institutions were not built for decades with at least consent from the people living there?
The two state solution was rejected, several times, in the past from Palestine.
So do i understand you right, that you advocate for the genocide of the Palestinians, as is currently carried out by Israel?
If not, then why the fuck would you have a problem with people protesting for children, women and unarmed men not to be bombed and given access to food, water, shelter and healthcare?
No need to frame anyone. It’s just a question and if there would be so many supporters if they wouldn’t count at least as collaborateurs.
So yes, you’re pro-genocide.
Anyone thinking that protesting genocide means you’re collaborating with a terrorist group has the analytical capability of a moldy banana.
No need to frame anyone. It’s just a question
JAQing off is a bullshit defense, otherwise I could just ask questions about where you were when someone was murdered. After all, I’m not saying you murdered anyone, I’m just asking questions about the murder and your possible involvement.
You were the one framing Palestinians as Hamas supporters, you got called a genocide supporter now and you’re backtracking.
Oh boy. I’m out. Sorry to have y’all disturbed in your echo chamber opinions.
Have fun with the downvotes.
Again, the question is why you have a problem with protesting for children and women not getting killed?
Do oyu understaand the concept, that children cannot be criminals, and most certainly never “deserve” to be killed?
And I suppose all the Americans protesting the Vietnam War were dyed-in-the-wool Communists, huh?
What? How can you compare these two scenarios??? Oh my god, there really is nothing to be achieved with talking to the likes of you.
What’s the difference?
If those situations are incomparable, surely you can explain why, right?
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That’s not even a comparison
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This is the problem with the Palestinian movement. I’d support their movement whole-heartedly if it was a non-violent resistance movement.
But it isn’t.
It’s a movement that’s dominated by people that either support or look the other way about a part of their movement going into villages and massacring people. That’s not a movement a lot of people are going to support. It’s only something that can be supported by psychopaths or people too emotional to think things through because of the things that are being spammed on their social media feeds.
I don’t even think the Palestinian movement would have to be non-violent to get massive support from the world at large. All Hamas needed to do was not go after soft civilian targets, like the October 7th attack.
I think they would have much more support if they kept their military focused on the IDF and Israeli government, not Israeli civilians.
If Israel has shown us anything, Hamas could still get away with killing civilians, as long as they were collateral in an attack on the IDF and Israeli military. They lose people’s support by focusing on terrorizing non-combatants.
None of this is to say that the IDF or Israeli government are the righteous ones in this war. They have done disgusting things to the Palestinians, themselves. Both regimes are terrible in their own ways, and they kind of deserve each other. I just feel terrible for all of the innocent Palestinians and Israelis caught up in this mess.
I don’t even think the Palestinian movement would have to be non-violent to get massive support from the world at large. All Hamas needed to do was not go after soft civilian targets, like the October 7th attack.
If they had used the tens of billions of dollars that the world has donated them for building up their societies between 1990s and today instead of endlessly preparing to destroy Israel, that would have helped a lot. It would helped with everything.
Unfortunately, it seems that just pouring money into a society doesn’t help build human capital.
The money donated to Palestine was mostly used to save people from the many crisises and famines that the Palestinians have endured. A lot of it went to rebuilding the education system, providing health care, and social services in a war torn, open air prison. Sure, some bit of it went to building missiles and weapons, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t tried to “build up” Palestine.
This situation is a bit too complicated to solve by just throwing money at it, anyways. Even if Hamas didn’t spend one penny of Palestinian aid on weapons, they would still be in a pretty similar situation.
Hamas gets funding from assholes in the region that are bitter over all of the humiliating defeats of Arab countries by Israel. The leadership of Hamas that lives in Qatar are billionaires. If they weren’t routinely fire rockets at Israeli population centers over the last decade and a half, that funding would go to another group. Similarly Iran would be providing weapons to some other group if Hamas didn’t go after civilian targets.
And If Hamas just went after the IDF directly, they’d be dead.
Entities like Hamas obviously don’t exist to protect their people. I mean they’re right now hiding in underground bunkers leaving the civilian population at the mercy of an army they claim to be committing genocide. They only exist to maintain power. They do this by fascist means of propaganda. Gotta keep that money rolling in from bitter old oil rich Arabs. They need there to violence so they can produce propaganda and maintain their power and their funding.
Israel and Saudi Arabia were very close to normalizing relations. In all likelihood that deal would block funding from Saudi Arabia going to Hamas. That’s a game changer. What can Hamas do to prevent the game from changing? It’s gotta be something big…
So no, Hamas just isn’t compatible with a peaceful co-existence. They simply wouldn’t exist without the violence. I was hoping Palestinian groups would denounce Hamas and separate themselves from these violent assholes. I can understand people in Gaza not being able to do this out of fear of reprisals. But Palestinians living in the West?
But unfortunately that didn’t happen. Seems too many people are fine with Hamas continuing to exist which means the violence will continue into the next generation. Unless Israel can succeed in their stated goal of obliterating Hamas, but that’s something that will cost many lives of Palestinians which will also result in the violence continuing into the next generation.
But some Hamas assholes are billionaires living in a life of luxury in Qatar and people in the west get to post memes that get them internet points, so I guess the violence has to continue to keep the assholes of the world happy.
how is it legal to protest on a bridge? that’s got to be breaking at least one law
it’s not wrong to break the law, it’s wrong to commit genocide.
forcing traffic to halt on a bridge isnt going to stop a war on the other side of the planet.
It’s funny, they said the same thing about the protests against the Vietnam war.
And it didn’t. The protests started in earnest a full 8 years before the war ended.
So the protests weren’t blocking enough bridges for 8 full years.
Yes clearly it wasn’t the method that was wrong it was the humans weren’t noble enough.
We solve problems in democracy by peaceful protest, voting, lawsuits, and swaying public opinion. We don’t solve problems in a democracy by blocking ambulances and pissing the hell out of regular people. No one just trying to pick up their kids is going to want to hear about your cause when you are blocking the road.
they don’t block ambulances, they let them through. you’ve never been to a protest and it shows
